By Carla D. Robinson

Nobody ever said life in El Barrio was easy. But shame on anybody who doesn’t believe it can be beautiful too. In Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, Willie Perdomo’s first collection of poems, he brings home the rapture of life in Spanish Harlem, creating a picture that is as lush in its dark beauty as it is stunning in its poignancy.

Perdomo came up through the Nuyorican Poets Café, where he earned his wings as a Grand Slam Champ. Perdomo credits the Nuyorican with both informing and changing his life. “It gave me a reference,” the 34 year-old poet recalled. “A body of New York Puerto Rican literature, poetry, theater, and as it transformed into an international camp for poets, I started to develop my voice there.”

It’s a voice that Perdomo uses to juxtapose the story of El Barrio with the larger world that both limits and necessitates it. He is not a poet who can’t envision himself outside of the place where he grew up, nor is he without an understanding of the ways in which that place travels with him. It is his ability to make us yearn for El Barrio, for Harlem, where some of us may have never been, that casts him as a poet with heart.

And for those of us who may have known the pleasure and pain of walking down 125th Street on a busy afternoon, Perdomo helps us to see what we likely missed. In his ode to One-Two-Five, “Let Me Ask You Somethin’,” what materializes most clearly is the entanglement of cultures. From Perdomo’s descriptions of “A moreno and his hermano” fighting, someone asking “Wanna make a donation to the nation, brother?” and “Senegalese masks hanging off parking lot gates,” a seldom-depicted cultural understanding emerges.

Perdomo acknowledged such artists as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, Rilke, Piri Thomas, Hector Lavoe, Willie Colon, John Cheever, and Miguel Pinero as having helped him gather enough colors to paint the world for the rest of us. Of Pinero, Perdomo said, “I think his poem ‘The Book of Genesis According to Saint Miguelito‘ is one of the greatest allegorical poems ever written. His use of language and his aesthetic of spitting the street back on the street or stripping the skin off something that is already raw definitely informs my writing.”

In his own work, Perdomo often finds that the English palette is not big enough to fully illustrate his experiences. “I’ve heard poems in Italian and Spanish and I can say that English is limiting. That’s why I try to hijack language off the street. I use verbatim discussions. I add Spanglish and hip-hop speak.”

Perdomo recently finished his second collection of poems, titled Smoking Lovely. He has also written Visiting Langston, a new children’s book in verse about a little girl poet who visits Hughes’ home with her father. Currently, Perdomo is working on a young adult novel set in East Harlem and awaiting the birth of a baby boy. M

May 2002